I always have quite a bit on my pending list to read – academic papers, blogs, planets, and the sort. Usually, when I go through the planets, such as the Fedora, GNOME or the two neuroscience planets I use – neuroscience, neuroscientists, I don’t have the time to read all the articles right then. I used to either bookmark links, or note them down somewhere to read later. One day, though, I ran into Pocket, which lets you save the article to read later and makes it available to you on multiple devices. It’s extremely convenient.

Of course, the one issue with Pocket is that it isn’t Free software. So, like I do, I went looking for an alternative. After a few hours, I ran into Wallabag on Github. It’s written in PHP, and is licensed under the MIT license. It’s quite easy to deploy, and there’s a Gitter channel where you can get some help too.

You either enter the URL in the Wallabag page manually, or you can use the Firefox/Chrome/Opera addon – it let’s you right click a page or a link and “Wallabag.it!”. There’s also a bookmarklet, which you can use with Pentadactyl, for example:

Wallabag fetches the text of the page and stores it for you so that you can read it later. You can even organise your saved pages with tags and the sort.

Here’s a page that I’m trying to read later, for example:

I played with a deployment, but decided not to deploy and maintain an instance myself. Instead, I signed up for the instance Wallabag have here – Wallabag.it. It’s quite cheap – they have an offer going too at the moment – only 9€ for an entire year!